


Gestalt

by OffYourBird



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Reality, F/M, Post-Series, Romance, Season/Series 03, Season/Series 04, Season/Series 05, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 09:19:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12187245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OffYourBird/pseuds/OffYourBird
Summary: A love story in pieces and parts.(spans multiple seasons, beginning with Season 3)





	Gestalt

_You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful._  
\- The Gestalt Prayer

\--------------------------------------------------- 

 

It’s the smallest gesture that Spike notices – the haphazard way Buffy's eyes flick to his in the magic shop, almost unwilling, and gone before he can even think to acknowledge it.

In the end, it’s a miracle he sees it at all, considering he’s been drunk off his gourd for three weeks straight. Or is it months now? Time’s been swinging unreliably. He forgot to mind the gap and now’s he sunk right down into a bottomless gulch, plummeting uncontrolled to some place only infinity can find. He’s been plunging downward for a while.

And her eyes are reeling him back in. Back up.

 _You taste like ashes_. His dark princess’s words shiver through him, and all at once he can’t pretend he doesn’t know what the fuck she was on about.

It’s  _her_  and her glance, hauling him bodily into the sky, where the light will raze him to a crisp.

And he hates her for it.

No, that’s a lie. He’s never really hated her. She’s the kind of woman a vampire tries to end the world over, because she’s crawled under his skin so deep that no amount of living evil can drive her out.

That’s a hell of a woman.

Fuck.

But there’s no help for it now, so he rolls his eyes and looks at her as she leans against the shelves, staunchly avoiding his gaze; and he looks at his grandsire, sunk so low into the misery that he loves. And he washes his hands of them both.

“I may be Love’s Bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it,” he tells them with heavy exasperation.

Her eyes flick up to his again, and he wonders if she sees the same thing he does; the inevitably of him, all hers to use and toss and take.

He won’t let her. God, he  _can’t_  let her. So he grins – as much his armor as his coat – and chooses to delight in the little tragedy scene before his eyes. And bloody hell, how did he end up with a playing part?

He tells them he’s off to torture Dru back into loving him, but even as he drives with the music blaring, he knows it’s no use.

It won’t keep him from running though.

 

***

 

It’s her hands that capture his notice when he returns, so raging with heat that he wonders how her skin doesn’t burst into flames.

He knows his will, if ever she lets him inside.

Instead she ties him to a chair, and he makes a racket about circulation, just something to capture her attention. Her irritation. Her hate. Doesn’t matter if it’s any or all of them, in the end.

God, he’s so royally buggered.

And after the engagement spell, he finds he has to redefine the meaning of that phrase. When now she’s had her hands all over him, in the curls that are eternally rioting, and against his chest where he thinks she could make his heart beat again, and near the swell of his desire for her. When she loved him and he loved her and when his love hasn’t gone away, and it's hours after the magic has ended. He doesn’t dare ask what happened to his ring.

Instead, he lies back, sinking deep into the dulled porcelain tub, and closes his eyes against the sunlight. But she gets beneath his lids, and he’s so sodding drowning in her scent that he tosses off twice and doesn’t feel any better.

So, in the dark and solitude, he rages and cries – so fucking furious that he’s not sure he can form words.

And then the bathroom door opens and she steps inside, no doubt investigating the commotion.

His prick is out, limp, and he’s covered in his own spendings, but suddenly he doesn’t even care anymore.

“Just stake me, Buffy,” he tells her, head hanging low.

He can almost taste the pulsing tang of her embarrassment. For finding him this way. For making her speak to him so soon after, or at all. She doesn’t approach him, which isn’t a surprise, but it means she’s unlikely to show him the mercy of a stake.

“Can fire a crossbow from the doorway,” he says softly, staring down into the murk of the tub, watching the rumpled lines of his dark jeans.

“No.”

That’s all she says.  _No._

And, finally, he might actually hate her. Just a little.

 

***

 

It’s her lips he can’t escape next. He wonders if she knows the torture she puts him through just owning them.

They’re his damnation and his deliverance. Spouting venom he can’t help but revel in, the source of all her fire and spark. And god, he hopes that never changes, because it’ll mean she’s gone cold. For now, she rakes his heart and shreds his skin with those pink and pouting parts, and it makes him want to laugh. Sometimes he does, and her fists add accompaniment.

Still, she flays him more surely with softness; as when he stakes his sire about to shock her with a sodding cattle prod. His ripe and wicked plum, who had come to save him from burning. And she turns to ash with only a startled cry. He lets his past sift through his trembling fingers, watches it flutter to rest in the grass near some other bloke’s grave.

He finds he can’t wish it were otherwise.

But he still sobs and laments that he let his dark goddess go this way – the woman who salvaged his pitiful existence and built him up into delicious evil. He’s crying for her, and for him, and for this present that’s left him so unsteady and bewildered and stumbling. He almost sinks into sunrise, not even so much on purpose as in shock.

But Buffy doesn’t let him. She drags him back into the cool of his crypt, where he is eternally reminded that he’s something dead – only he’s built a kind of life here, and he’s not sure how the two are supposed to go together without something dying.

She abandons him with a kiss. It’s more delicate and fleeting than the breeze. The brevity makes him question his sanity, but she leaves behind an undeniable trace of warmth. More gutting are the words that follow as she shuts the door, chasing out the morning.

“Thank you. And I’m sorry.”

 

***

 

At one point, her voice is all he has, because he’s gotten such a thrashing that not much else is working.

It’ll be something to brag about someday, when he has the energy and a better-functioning jaw – surviving the wrath of a god.

He grunts when she helps set his arm. For once, she’s talking to him without prompting; a kind of low cadence that threatens to lull him into submission.

That’s a laugh. If he sinks any lower in obeisance, he’ll have to start digging through the floor.

But he’ll do it without question, if she asks.

“You’re not a man,” she tells him, and all at once he wishes his hearing had gone the way of his other senses. Better to exist in silence than take in this kind of calm rejection. He tries to turn away from her, but his torso isn’t cooperating, and he’s stuck in a horrible almost paralysis. Is this the part where he falls to ashes? God, he hopes, because elsewise he’ll have to listen to the echoes of her rebuke until madness or sleep takes him. Either prospect seems unbearable.

“No man would have survived this,” she continues after a beat, and he shifts his head to stare at her, even though his eyes aren’t much more than decoration at the moment. “And I’m pretty sure no man could have managed to annoy a freaking  _god_  as much as you.”

His voice escapes in a breathless, pained laugh. “Think Harris’s mouth could have done the trick, but his body’s a mite… soft.”

She is quiet for a minute as she wraps his battered ribs and he laments both that he's in too much in pain to enjoy her touch and that he’s opened up his gob and ruined the easy conversation she’d started.

But then her voice sounds out, amused and indulgent. “Yeah, definitely too soft.” She giggles a bit at the end, the sound lighter than anything he’s heard from her in months. He sits still as stone, unwilling to disturb what he’s sure must be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence – this kindness between them.

Then it turns out the universe isn’t done playing him for a fool, when Buffy crawls onto the stone slab with him. He doesn’t dare move for the shock of it, and can’t fathom what in the bleeding hell she’s doing until she turns to him, her words leaving miniature gusts of heat on his cheek.

“You’d lose a fight with a housefly right now.”

Gratitude can’t even begin to explain the expansion in his chest as understanding filters from his fogged head. He’s kept her safe. Kept the Niblet out of hellish reach. Now she’s doing the same for him.

But he’s sure she doesn’t mean anything much by it.

So when she takes his hand in a light grasp, carefully avoiding his broken thumb, he gasps and, trembling, finds himself suddenly and entirely too awake and aware, even though his senses are dulled to inconsequentiality.

“Go to sleep, Spike,” she murmurs.

And, ever Love’s Bitch, he finds he has no choice but to obey. He leaves consciousness with the soft whisper of her reassurances.

 

***

 

It’s her silences he notices now, those voids where time is meaningless and the lack of noise means everything. He’s tried to take on the burden of her mantel, but knows he’s lacking in all the ways that matter. Still, now that she’s rejected the placement out of grief and honor and anger, he’s been doing his best.

She moved into his crypt the day after it happened. Just barged straight in without a word, holding a suitcase at her side. And stared at him.

God, the silence said everything.

So he dropped down into the lower level and cleared out half his dresser for her, and let that be his answer.

He knows that she’s come because this is a place for dead things – a place where his Niblet now resides just down the way – but his crypt has never felt more alive. He finds that he can’t help but fill it with flowers. He digs them up by the roots and plants them in the washed out styrofoams that once held blood. He likes the kind of life the containers hold now, mostly because she sees them and smiles. Someday, maybe enough of her smiles will ease the burning agony of his failure.

She comes with him when he patrols, but that’s all it is. Her coming with  _him_. Still, it holds up enough of the appearance of her duty that the Watcher and Slayerettes seem to think she’ll come around. He doesn’t bother to correct them.

They’ve been sharing his bed for a month when he wakes to find her insistent above him. He hasn’t worn his kit to bed for weeks, but she’s always kept a shirt on. Now her breasts hang free and rosy, more magnificent than he dared ever hope.

“Buffy?”

She doesn’t say a word, but the silence is electrifying. He can’t help it – he crushes himself against her and gives his love to her tits and her lips and her wet folds, and tries to take away all her pain with gasps and kisses and the easy, insistent way his prick can slide in and out of her slickness. He tells her, finally, when they lay sated and sweated and quiet.

“I know I’m not worthy. Know you don’t love me. But I love you. Think I’ll love you until I’m dust.”

Buffy just looks at him, but her mouth curves up slightly and she brushes a fingertip across his lips. And he thinks maybe silence is forgiveness.

He thinks maybe the quiet can redeem them both.

 

***

 

It’s the curve of her shoulder he can’t ignore now. He can never find the way of it – how something so slim and luscious can hold such power. He is entranced.

But then, he’s always been held sway in her thrall. He’s certain she has one made especially for him, although his verbal insistence of it just makes her laugh and swat at him. He’ll keep insisting for that response alone.

The heavy sunlight hours are a curse, but he’ll abide them until eternity for the way the equatorial sun drives her to forgo sleeves. It’s not like the warmth-drenched mood of her California, where coverings were still an option, depending on the day. The heat here is pervasive at all hours.

She writes to her chums when the mood strikes her, usually once or twice a month. They have the solace of the other Slayer now, some wild, dark-haired bird newly released from Uncle Sam’s chokey. He doesn’t mention her aloud unless he wants an armful of furious golden goddess ripping his clothes down the middle, her kisses alternating with fierce exclamations about her being the only one who has permission to ride him. He’s halfway sorry and ecstatic he mentioned the encounter last year, ignorantly assuming his Slayer had been in the driver’s seat way back when.

Christ, she knows how to fuck angrily, with heavenly precision. It’s another vampire trait he finds in her, this unrelenting possession of him. Of course, she simply wants him. He  _needs_ her. It’s his weakness, and he's thankful she doesn’t abuse it. Well, more than he wants her to, anyhow.

And here under the Nigerian moon, his need is bright and unquenched, even though he’s already taken her twice this evening. But she’s turned slightly away from him, admiring the darkened cityscape from their flat's patio, and he can’t draw his eyes from the sun-kissed expanse of her bare shoulders.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever run out of parts of hers to admire. Or if he does, he’ll just start all over again. The beauty of her life – of this breathing and hot-blooded woman – is that no piece will ever be the same by the time he finds it again.

He is intoxicated by the exploration.

She looks over her shoulder at him with a knowing smile. He’s always been fuck all good at hiding the heat in his eyes. Instead of leading him back to the bedroom, however (or elsewhere – he’s not picky), she slides a stake into her purse and heads out the door.

Official retirement seems to have sparked her love of the fight again, and he’s grateful for that. And it’s even better here, where they can wash away the sweat and dust in the salty ocean with no worry that she’s needed elsewhere or that he’s tempting fate with vulnerability on the Hellmouth.

It’s just them, intertwined. He’s half a man at best, and she’s worn and time-hardened at minimum, but together they’re something else entirely. What that is keeps changing almost with each moment – long before he can pin it down – but he can’t bring himself to mind.

He just intends on watching it shift until the end of forever.


End file.
